Ten Innings at Wrigley: The Wildest Ballgame Ever, With Baseball on the Brink by Kevin Cook (review)

Kevin Cook watched a four-decade-old baseball game on the internet and decided to write 253 pages about it. Or at least that's how it feels. Although the book is officially titled "Ten Innings at Wrigley," the first two-thirds of it screams, more appropriately: "Three Hours on YouTube." For Cook's book is, frustratingly, largely as advertised: a summary of every at-bat that occurred during each half of the ten innings played between the Phillies and the Cubs that long-ago afternoon. No exceptions.

At least Cook chose an interesting game. The May 17, 1979, game between the Phillies and Cubs ended 23–22 in favor of the powder blues, with home runs rocketing over the ivy with abandon. It was a fun game to watch. I should know—I watched it in real time as it was happening. Or at least all but the first few innings of it, as I didn't get home from school until after my Phillies had staked the seemingly insurmountable lead the Cubs would then proceed to surmount. Regardless, it was a fun game. The wind was blowing out, the sun was shining, and everybody was hitting. Pete Rose, my new favorite player (having been signed away from the hated Reds the previous offseason), had three hits, Larry Bowa had five, and the Phils seemed primed to run away with the National League East once again, their fourth divisional title in succession. For the Phillies that May, everything seemed to be coming up, well, roses.

It didn't turn out that way, of course. The May 17 game would be one of the last highlights of the season for the Phillies, as injuries and, probably more damaging, overall locker room grumpiness, doomed them to a fourth-place finish when all was said and done. The Cubs, being the Cubs, could boast of even fewer highlights in 1979; they were on their way to another season in the wilderness, and everybody knew it. When the wind was blowing the right way at Wrigley, though, even they could be counted on to provide some thrills. And on this day it was, and they did.

Cook takes the reader through every at-bat in every inning, chronicling the Phils' large early lead and the Cubs' comeback. They'd eventually tie the game at twenty-two before losing, of course, in the tenth on, what else, a Mike Schmidt home run. If you're a Phillies fan of certain vintage, you'll probably enjoy the name drops sprinkled through the text such as Randy Lerch, Ron Reed and—wow!—Rudy Meoli. (If this isn't the first time you've thought of Rudy Meoli in decades, you're most likely a Meoli.) And older Cubs fans will most likely chuckle upon encountering such long-forgotten names as Larry Biittner and Mick Kelleher. Fans of both clubs might even do what I did—open their laptops and bring up the game itself to take in a few innings and bask in the analog nostalgia.

Which highlights a major problem with the concept of the book. With the game itself so easily accessible, it's unclear why anybody needs such a detailed summary of it on paper. More problematic, those watching the game on YouTube will probably do what they're likely to do when reading the book—stay for a few innings and then tune out. It was just an early season game between two teams going nowhere, after all. Not all that much to get excited about.

I'm going to assume that Cook was not responsible for the book's subtitle, but it does him no favors. Marrying the game to the phrase, "baseball on the brink" brings with it an expectation that at some point the larger historical significance of the game will be broached. To his credit, Cook...